Edbauer

Jenny Edbauer has lived in Austin, Texas since the early 1990’s, and is a writing professor at the University of Kentucky. The main audience for this text seems to be other scholars and rhetoricians. Her definition of rhetoric is similar to Bitzer’s, however she improves upon his idea by taking into account the fact that multiple factors of a situation blur together into exigence, rather than a single one being the cause. She shows this by recalling what two rhetoricians said about President George H.W. Bush’s war on drugs campaign. They say that the war on drugs campaign was caused by “concerns about safe neighborhoods, media images, encounters of everyday life in certain places, concerns about re-election, articulations of problems and the circulation of those articulations, and so forth.” She goes on to say that the exigence isn’t found in any one of these reasons, in fact, they all blend together to give exigence to President Bush’s war on drugs. Edbauer’s main argument is that rhetorical situations lead into an occurrence she calls “Rhetorical Ecology.” Rhetorical ecology entails thinking about a rhetorical situation in an open network, rather than a closed, one-off system. She elaborates upon this idea through the explanation of the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.” This slogan was originally used to combat big businesses and the shutdown of unique shops in Austin due to the inability to compete with them. However, as the slogan gained more traction, it formed a rhetorical ecology, leading to slogans such as “Keep Austin Reading”, “Keep Austin Liberal Arts,” and “Keep Austin Normal.” She explains that these slogans, except “Keep Austin Normal,” while have absolutely nothing in common with battling big business, play into the same rhetorical ecology due to the use of the obviously derivative slogans. Edbauer’s purpose is to inform others about how a rhetorical situation can be caused by a mix of different events, and how these rhetorical situations can lead to a rhetorical ecology.